Today In Cold War History
1953 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York. Because the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons did not operate an electric chair at the time, the Rosenbergs were transferred to the New York State-run Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining for execution. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at sundown on June 19, 1953. The executioner was Joseph Francel, then the executioner of New York.
1961 – Kuwait declares independence from the United Kingdom.
1964 – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
1970 – The Patent Cooperation Treaty is signed.
1972 – A Catholic civilian is shot dead by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the Cracked Cup Social Club, Belfast
1976 – US Viking 1 goes into Martian orbit after 10-month flight from Earth
1980 : An attack on the British embassy by attackers, armed with automatic weapons and grenades, ends when three of the attackers are shot dead by Iraqi security forces. No British embassy staff were injured during the attack.
1981 – Boeing commercial Chinook 2-rotor helicopter is certified
1981 – European Space Agency’s Ariane carries 2 satellites into orbit
1982 – In one of the first militant attacks by Hezbollah, David S. Dodge, president of the American University of Beirut, is kidnapped.
1985 – Members of the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, dressed as Salvadoran soldiers, attack the Zona Rosa area of San Salvador.
1988 -Sardinian province of Sassari, World’s Largest Sausage completed at 13 1/8 miles long. The record no longer stands. It was beaten in 2009 by the province of Potenza who created a 450 meter sausage.Beaten again in Romania in 2004 at 62.7km
1990 – The current international law defending indigenous peoples, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989, is ratified for the first time by Norway.
1990 – The Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic is founded in Moscow.
1991 – The Soviet occupation of Hungary ends.
1991 – Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar surrenders to police